This paper describes the design and performance of the OREAD focal-reducing camera, constructed for use at the Cassegrain focus of the Michigan-Dartmouth-MIT Observatory McGraw-Hill 1.3-meter telescope. OREAD is an all-refractive optical system providing a 50-mm collimated beam suitable for commercially available narrow-band filters or grisms. Its collimator and field lens are custom-made to decrease the severe coma which would otherwise be present at the extremities of its 30-arc-min field. When used with a CCD such as the TI800 X 800, OREAD provides a field of view of 0.1 square degree at 175 pixel -1 . The focal ratio of OREAD of//1.63 allows sky-limited narrow-band images to be obtained with exposures of only moderate duration. In an Appendix we examine some limitations inherent in coarsely sampled data obtained with CCDs.

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We present a novel collaborative visual analytics application for cognitively overloaded users in the astrophysics domain. The system was developed for scientists who need to analyze heterogeneous, complex data under time pressure, and make predictions and time-critical decisions rapidly and correctly under a constant influx of changing data. The Sunfall Data Taking system utilizes several novel visualization and analysis techniques to enable a team of geographically distributed domain specialists to effectively and remotely maneuver a custom-built instrument under challenging operational conditions. Sunfall Data Taking has been in production use for 2 years by a major international astrophysics collaboration (the largest data volume supernova search currently in operation), and has substantially improved the operational efficiency of its users. We describe the system design process by an interdisciplinary team, the system architecture and the results of an informal usability evaluation of the production system by domain experts in the context of Endsley's three levels of situation awareness.

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This series of review papers is based on the invited talks given at the 184th meeting of the American Astronomical Society for the special topics session, "Digitizing the Sky.